Monday, January 23, 2017

Director, Vincente
Minnelli brought nothing new or even fresh to his big screen adaptation of Bells Are Ringing (1960); the Broadway
smash that endeared Judy Holliday to theater audiences in 1956 and would –
again, for the movie – charm us with her effervescent and irresistible joie de
vivre. Miss Holliday, it ought to be noted, is today one of the most
grotesquely underrated (and underexposed) comedian/raconteurs of her
generation; a bon vivant who could play the blonde ditz like nobody’s business,
yet as equally stir monuments of empathy and pathos as propriety and the part
demanded (see her performance in the drowning scene from 1952’s The Marrying Kind as proof…if you can
find it anywhere on home video!). In hindsight, Bells Are Ringing is a better-than-average example of the Broadway
to Hollywood hybrid that briefly flourished in the mid-fifties, and would again
be resurrected with modulating degrees of success throughout the 1960’s; not so
much ‘adapted for’ as almost
literally ‘transcribed’ on celluloid with
unerring fidelity to its source material. At a then staggering cost of
$3,246,000, ‘Bells’ irrevocable loss of nearly $1,800,000 at the box office,
at least, in hindsight, spoke more to the overall audience shift away from such
slickly packaged entertainments, rather than any artistic flaw inherent in the
picture itself. And MGM was hardly in a position to buffer the costs of
producing a big n’ splashy musical extravaganza in 1960. Hence, what we have
here (despite the promises made in a breathtaking aerial intro to the isle of
Manhattan – in Cinemascope) is a studio-bound effort, more at home in the
isolated trappings borrowed from virtually every Metro musical (and a few
non-musicals) made at that studio from the 1940’s; given a fresh coat of paint
(but precious little else), if ever so slight a rearrangement to camouflage its
‘hand-me-down’ effect. Hence, it is saying a great deal of the stars of this
movie, also Minnelli’s direction, that the resultant film – despite its many
shortcomings – is an effervescent gem, even if the many delays incurred along the
way had allowed the glowing memory of the Broadway original to fade from public
consciousness by the time the movie came out.

As was the
case on stage, Judy Holliday is the movie’s raison d’etre - extraordinary in
every way; blessed, as all truly gifted comediennes are, with an unexpected
depth and affecting quality. She could as easily entertain us with a hearty
chuckle as unexpectedly tug at our heartstrings. In a memorable career, cut far too short by
the breast cancer ultimately to claim her at the gentle age of 43, Holliday
gave us dizzy dames and daring madcaps, each blessed with an inimitable blend
of endearing and blissful sorrow. And to her credit, Holliday never seems
transparent in this hallowed resolve to surprise with unexpected nuggets of
wisdom. It has oft been said it takes a very smart person to play a total
idiot. Holliday’s heroines are dumb only on the surface - a seemingly essential
prerequisite for being ‘born yesterday’…or, at least – born blonde. But she is
as astute in her views of the world as thoroughly infectious as the innocent,
put upon by cads lurking around every corner in Manhattan’s cosmopolitan jungle.
Make no mistake, in virtually all her screen appearances it’s this little lost
lamb that ends up taking a considerable bite out of the wolves. And yet,
Holliday, who would have preferred a career as a writer, and harbored the
deepest admiration for good writing, was quite cynical about acting in general
and her place within its theatrical firmament. “Acting is a very limited form of expression,” she once said, “…and those who take it seriously are very
limited people. I take it seriously. But I hated the idea of being an actress.
I used to throw up before every performance and cry afterwards. I thought I was
learning about show biz. The more painful it was, the more important I thought
the experience must be, and hating it, I convinced myself it must be
invaluable. In repose my face looks as though I’ve gone through some terrible
ordeal in the last five minutes. So, I have to disguise that expression and get
a glassy-eyed looked…something I learned from my dog!”

We ought to
sincerely thank the mutt. And so, we arrive at Holliday’s Ella Peterson in Bells Are Ringing; just a disembodied
voice in ‘a perfect relationship’;
working the lines of a lower east side telephone answering service and giving
every client the individual attention their fragile egos crave. She can play
Santa or silly and find truer meaning in loving her fellow man through her
work. Her boss, Sue Summers (Jean Stapleton) thinks she is nuts. Moreover, Sue
isn’t about to waste her time kissing up to the clientele. They are a paycheck
and that’s all. On stage, Bells Are
Ringingwas mostly a one woman show; Holliday sustaining the piece with her
sheer stage presence and comedic magnetism. The movie ever so slightly divides
our interests between Ella and the object of her affections: playwright, Jeffrey
Moss (affectionately fleshed out in all his gin-soaked glory by everyone’s
favorite drunk, Dean Martin). Today, we take alcoholism seriously; but in
Martin’s era he not only made a career out of elegant inebriation, but
charmingly poked fun at the greatly exaggerated public persona of a chronic
booze hound that helped to make him an enviable star, interjecting quips like, “I once shook hands with Pat Boone…my entire
right side sobered up” or “…the
reason I drink is because when I’m sober I think I’m Eddie Fisher!” Martin
also claimed in a tuxedo he was a star; in plain clothes – a nobody. Point well
taken in Bells Are Ringing, as
Dean-o rarely appears out of that celebrated form of men’s attire, and when he
does, his on-screen persona is of a ‘failed writer’. Throughout Bells Are Ringing, the chemistry
between Martin and Holliday is first rate; their repartee on par with the great
romantic screen teams of yesteryear; as a couple, they possess a genuine
William Powell/Myrna Loy quality. If not for Holliday’s looming illness and
untimely death, we might have seen more of this pair in subsequent movies.

In Bells Are Ringing, Holliday is Martin’s
social conscience and moral compass. Boy, does he need one! Not only has
Jeffrey Moss fallen on hard times – creatively – but, like the old joke about
RKO Studios, he hasn’t had a hit in years. At one point, Ella – known only to
Jeffrey as someone he chooses to call ‘mom’, illustrates what a crime it would
be for him to give up writing. She
inspires him to put down the bottle and pick up the typewriter. Without ever
meeting, these two are already in love.
He, in turn, brings out Ella’s sex appeal, frustratingly suppressed
beneath her giddy façade, but eventually unearthed by his tender and burgeoning
devotion to this woman who, in the flesh, he knows under the pseudonym,
Melisande Scott. It’s a joyous ruse, one
initially perpetuated by Ella to ease Jeffrey back into his groove after
‘mom’s’ coaxing has already failed. Really, Ella loves Jeffrey that much, and,
in this steel and concrete abyss of fair-weather friends, Jeffrey can use all
the sincerity Ella/mom/Melisande can offer him. Alas, in faking her identity,
Ella comes to realize she is no better than Olga (Valerie Allen), the vacuous
tart who sees Jeffrey only as a handsome meal ticket to escort her to the
races.

Bells Are Ringingwas produced at the tail end of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s reign as the purveyors of top-flight musical
entertainments. In some ways, the property fit MGM’s idea of mass entertainment
better than its’ direct competition on Broadway then; Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, eventually snatched up by
Warner Bros. At a time when Broadway had virtually eschewed its own conventions
for putting on a show – razzamatazz traded for highbrow morality set to music,
a la the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein – scenarists, Betty Comden and Adolph
Green had dared to pen an unapologetic homage to all those Tin Pan Alley yarns
of yesteryear with barely enough plot to link together Jules Styne’s ebullient
cacophony of toe-tapping hit tunes. Bells
Are Ringingwas, in fact, chastised by the hoity-toity critics for its straightforward
and threadbare plot. Yet, in hindsight, the play resurrects and revitalizes
that woolly-headed frivolity presently lacking, and even more desperately
missed, in the American theater; just a simple story about simple people, other
simple people can root for with a smile. Still, bringing Bells Are Ringingto the screen was hardly a joy galore for
Vincente Minnelli. In fact, the project was repeatedly stalled, first – to
satisfy contractual obligations pertaining to its Broadway run, then by a
sudden disinterest afflicting Comden and Green, who had been paid handsomely to
adapt ‘Bells’ for the big screen. The pair, alas, was involved in
preparing a Broadway retrospective of their work. Their first draft for the
movie version of Bells Are Ringing
mildly incensed producer, Arthur Freed; a script for a nearly three hour
feature MGM had neither the time, ambitions or budget to make. Comden and
Green’s second crack was more compact, but seemingly made off the cuff and
lacking cohesion.

In the end, Bells are Ringingwould come off a
decidedly scaled down affair; Arthur Freed urging the show’s lyricist, Jules
Styne to pen three new songs (only two ultimately used). The rights to produce
it had cost Freed just under a cool half a million. To manage costs further,
only the main title sequence would be shot on location in New York, the rest
cobbled together from obvious sets and brief exteriors employing Metro’s own
free-standing New York street back lot facades; easily identifiable to anyone
who has seen more than, say, three MGM movies in their lifetime. Remarkably,
none of this penny-pinching affects the film’s lighter-than-air atmosphere,
perhaps because Vincente Minnelli has wisely focused his camera on the
performers instead of the scenery. Even so, Bells Are Ringing is not Minnelli’s best work; at least, from an
inventive standpoint. Minnelli, who could usually be counted upon to be
deliciously ‘out there’ in concocting
his musical fantasias, herein stays pretty close to his source material. There
are no ‘dream sequences’, no clever
camera angles or romanticized uses of color and/or color filters to draw undue
attention or elevate the overall impact and mood of any particular scene.
Instead, we have a facile evocation of the stage play, ever so slightly ‘opened
up’ for the expansive Cinemascope screen. Again, none of this hurts the film.

The one
unforgivable sin, if one can call it that, is Minnelli’s decision to
unceremoniously distill Ella’s marvelous cha-cha-cha into a wan ghost flower of
what it had been on the stage. Performed in a decidedly unglamorous back alley
with Carl (Doria Avila), the Hispanic boyfriend of fellow phone operator,
Gwynne (Ruth Storey), in her red ball gown, a La Traviatta hand-me-down given
to Ella in gratitude by operatic sensation, Madame Grimaldi (Marina Koshetz),
Judy Holliday manages to meld high art with even higher camp. It’s a delirious
lampoon; Carl attempts to teach Ella the dance for her first date with Jeffrey;
their seductive pas deux ending on a deliciously cynical note as Carl
unexpectedly clasps Ella’s buttocks with a pronounced slap; her fiery elation
at having mastered the steps instantly turned into icy desolation and a faraway
‘I can’t believe what just happened’
look of bewilderment caught in her eyes. Yet, all that Minnelli can think of
herein is to dissolve to the next scene, his lack of punctuation, more
perfunctory than pleasing and decidedly telling of his own ennui on the project.
Indeed, Minnelli had moved on, or rather, decidedly away from movie musicals by
1960; perhaps, having twice been nominated, and won the Oscar for Gigi (1958), recognizing the genre and
he had come about as far as he was willing to go. “I think musicals will have to deal with more important subject matter,”
Minnelli mused, “No more backstage
stories…nothing of that sort.” If so, then Bells Are Ringing is, in many ways, the antithesis of Minnelli’s
prediction; old-fashion and even slightly campy. It would have been a sensation
in 1945, and arguably, a sizable smash in the mid to late fifties. But lest we
forget, 1960 was a year dominated by such ‘now’ classic offerings as Psycho, Spartacus, Butterfield 8,
and, The Magnificent Seven; ‘Bells’
only significant rival in the musical genre, Fox’s clunky and misguided
adaptation of Cole Porter’s Broadway spectacle, Can-Can, that sought to emulate – nee, resurrect, the wonderment of Gigi, right down to casting
Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan in transparently familiar roles.

The other
great performance in Bells Are Ringing
belongs to old-time Vaudeville ham, Eddie Foy Jr., as the deviously slick, J.
Otto Prantz, who has completely swept Sue off her two left feet in order to
operate his spurious racketeering enterprise right under her nose and the radar
of the law; the answering service covering for his already nefarious
alter-enterprise – Titanic Records – a false front, placing illegal bets. Like
Dean Martin, Foy came to this movie with a fresh pair of eyes; the part
originated as ‘Sandor’ on stage by Eddie Lawrence. Unusual for Arthur Freed, Bells Are Ringing retains most of its
Broadway’s alumni, including Hal Linden, the stage’s Jeffrey Moss (herein, in a
minor role as a nightclub entertainer, belting out one of the lesser songs,
‘The Midas Touch’). From Broadway, Freed also borrowed Bernie West to reprise
his misguided dentist/composer, Dr. Joe Kitchell, and Dort Clark, for the
comedic and caustic, Police Inspector Barnes.
The last bit of inspired casting went to Frank Gorshin, a superb mimic, doing
his fifteen seconds of ‘the great mumbler’; a fractured Marlon Brando knock-off
as Blake Barton; a beatnik on the cusp of hitting the big time.

Bells Are Ringing opens with some spectacular
aerial shots of Manhattan under its main title credits. By the early sixties,
Hollywood had become increasingly more daring in taking their cameras on
location, necessitated by audiences’ demands for realism in their
entertainments. And yet, MGM chose to buck this trend, particularly where
musicals were concerned; two bright and breezy outdoorsy musicals - Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (both in 1954), famously (or infamously)
shot within the confines of several sound stages It is therefore more than a little
disheartening to realize all that remains of the Big Apple in Bells Are Ringing, a movie set on the
lower east side, are these introductory snippets – Minnelli skillfully avoiding
any direct references thereafter, and centralizing his action mostly within
interior settings to create – with varying degrees of success – the uber chic
look of this East Coast Mecca; the one unforgivable sin, the staging of the
movie’s romantic pas deux, ‘Just in Time’
against an obvious papier-mâché backdrop of the George Washington Bridge, later
immortalized on its own terms, and to perfection, from an almost identical camera
angle (but for real) in Woody Allen’s 1979 classic, Manhattan. From here, we
segue into a charmingly ludicrous montage, featuring a bevy of MGM contract
beauties, flaxen-haired and bubble-headed; inquisitively pondering what an
answering service can do for their careers and love lives. There is something
insidiously charming about Minnelli’s direction as he almost immediately
debunks their storied glamour, dissolving to the crumbling brownstone surrounded
by vacant lots on the lower east side. Here is the real home office of the fabled
Susanswerphone messaging service; its reported army of call-screeners,
exhibiting ‘chic good taste’,
distilled to three sweaty toilers - Ella Peterson, Sue Summers and Gwynne - in
an un-air-conditioned basement flat with unattractive headsets glued to their
ears. In tandem, the girls field inquiries for their roster of clientele. It
becomes rather obvious Ella is the favorite. She uses the service as a means to
disseminate pertinent information on everything from child-rearing to cold remedies
to her grateful clients.

Sue encourages
prudence. After all, police have been readily cracking down on answering
services all over the city after it was discovered a few were being used as
fronts for prostitution. Not long thereafter, Susanswerphone is raided by
Inspector Barnes and detective Francis (Ralph Roberts). Barnes is gunning for a
promotion. When he can find no proof of their complicity in any illegal
enterprise, he vows instead to remain vigilant, presumably to catch this trio
up to no good. Susanswerphone’s neediest client is Plaza ‘0’ Double-4 Double-3;
Jeffrey Moss - a boozing playwright who cannot bring himself to the typewriter
without a stiff drink into his hand. One leads to another and before long the
highballs outnumber words on the printed page. Ella is convinced all Jeffrey
needs is the right muse to inspire him. She adopts a maternal approach to their
conversations; then, elects to sneak off to his apartment after becoming
jealous of a flirtatious conversation she overhears between Jeff and his
unpleasant paramour, Olga. Ella makes short shrift of this sex pot, posing as
Moss’ secretary; a ruse he willingly subscribes to, in order to rid himself of
an awkward sexual liaison. But afterward, Jeff attempts to pick up with Ella
where he and Olga left off. Instead, she admonishes him for his lack of
originality and initiative; urging him to consider what shirking his
responsibilities now could mean to his future prospects as a playwright. Through her connections at work, Ella already
knows producer, Larry Hastings (Fred Clark) is hunting for a new show.

Sifting in and
out of Jeff’s life with the ease of a blithe spirit, Ella also works her magic
on a forlorn dentist, Dr. Kitchell, who would much rather spend his time
penning lyrics to songs he hopes to peddle along the Great White Way. In fact,
Kitchell spends his afternoons composing music on his air hose. Ella also steps
into the part of beatnik gal pal to Blake Barton, an out of work actor, telling
him if he wants to be taken seriously he has to “cut the blue jeans action” and improve his fractured diction.
Ramping up her involvement on Jeff’s play, Ella reinvents herself as Melisande
Scott. She agrees to go out on a date but then begins to get cold feet when
Olga suggests she doesn’t buy her sweet act for a moment. An impromptu buck and
wing in the park with Jeffrey near the George Washington Bridge ends up
entertaining a group of casual passersby. But it also solidifies Jeff’s love
for Melisande. Eventually, the pair arrives at Hastings’ Sutton Place townhouse
to discuss Jeff’s play. Regrettably, this turns out not to be a private meeting
but a very elegant house party, teeming to the rafters with the inanely wealthy
and socially superficial. Ella is encourage to play along and ‘Drop That Name’; a wicked lampoon of how
deals get done by movers and shakers in love with their own navel-gazing charm.
In the meantime, Otto has trained Sue how to take orders for Titanic Records;
the title of each album code for a particular race track; the speed of the recording,
actually the amount of money a particular bookie is trying to bet.

Attending his
cronies deep inside the bowels of New York’s public works (a scene vaguely
reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s ‘Luck Be A
Lady’ from the film version of Guys
and Dolls, 1955), Otto explains the intricacies of his ‘Simple Little System’. Too bad for Otto,
he knows his horses better than his composers. When Gwynne’s boyfriend, Carl,
overhears Ella unintentionally taking a bet for Beethoven’s 10th Symphony, he
intercepts the phone call to explain it must be a mistake: Beethoven only wrote
nine symphonies during his lifetime. To avoid confusion, Ella decides to
correct the order from ten to nine; thus, ruining the bet. In the meantime,
Jeffrey inadvertently stumbles upon Dr. Kitchell and Blake Barton in a
nightclub showcasing Kitchell’s new song, ‘The
Midas Touch’. The song is the same name as the title of Jeff’s new and soon
to be produced play. Kitchell adds that his inspiration for the composition was
a young blonde, and Barton, who has won the audition to play the lead, also
explains his encounter with a blonde. Piecing Melisande’s curious behaviors
together with more recollections from Barton and Kitchell, Jeffrey realizes the
woman who has come to mean so much in all their lives is one in the same.
Moreover, she is ‘mom’ – the disembodied voice of reason Jeff has been listening
to over at Susanswerphone. Back at the office, Ella tells Sue she has ruined
everything by playing mother in too many people’s lives. Although she has been
sincere in her efforts, she has lied to them all and, in the end – and worst of
all – has been untrue to herself. She wants no more of it. So Ella has decided
to go back to being just a lowly switchboard operator at the Bonjour Tristesse
Brazier Company. Alas, in reply to Ella’s accidentally botched ‘bet’, a pair of goons loyal to the mob
show up looking for Otto, presumably to break a few bones and collect the
monies owed them. Ella detains the pair long enough for Inspector Barnes, who
has been lurking outside, to get a clue and save the day. Elated at having
busted Otto’s racketeering operation – a much grander foil than a prostitution
ring - Barnes loosens his yolk on Susansophone. He reunites the services’
grateful callers, including Jeffrey, with Ella; the two wandering off together,
presumably for all time.

In hindsight,
it is perhaps easier to see why Bells
Are Ringingfailed to catch the zeitgeist in popular entertainments then;
either for its ilk or period. While admirers of the Broadway original were
quick to illustrate how Vincente Minnelli had adhered, rather obsessively, to
the precepts and pacing of the stage show, detractors were more likely to point
out that in doing so, Minnelli had all but deprived the two numbers that
book-ended the movie; ‘A Perfect
Relationship’and ‘I’m Going Back’
of their thematic bravado as bona fide cinematic climaxes. There is something
to this. Both numbers are showstoppers, playing on the strengths of their
stage-bound predecessor. For all intent and purposes, Minnelli’s camera remains
stationary; cinematographer, Milton Krasner lensing Judy Holliday as she
cavorts in full figure, the camera only moving when absolutely essential to
keep her in frame. A lesser performer might have succumbed to the dreaded
elephantiasis of filling these static peripheries with plausible action. But
Holliday, voice booming and charismatic in her grand gestures, manages to
capture and hold our attention. When she
is on the screen, she is impossible to ignore – and Holliday is on the screen
for virtually all of the movie’s run time.

Bells Are Ringing has other assets too: Preston
Ames and George W. Davis’ production design retains the stage show’s artifice,
newly expanded to complement the elongated proportions of Cinemascope. No one
could ever confuse their antiseptic facsimile of the George Washington Bridge,
all back lit with flickering kilowatts of Hollywood stardust to simulate
traffic, for the real thing. Nor can we suspend our disbelief in the magic of
MGM’s New York Street as a viable substitute for the thriving theater district,
herein cluttered with automobiles and foot traffic direct from Central Casting.
Still, such artfulness remains in service to the musical genre itself and the
MGM musical in particular, where cast members are expected to spontaneously
burst into song, accompanied by a never seen, though always heard, full-bodied
hundred piece orchestra. Such is the
fantastic world of the movie musical and best left to its unattainable
perfection far removed from the realities of life. Better still, under
conductor, André Previn’s baton, the MGM studio orchestra bursts forth in
4-track stereo with a sonic ambiance that is impossible to top. Bells Are Ringinglooks and sounds the
part of a vintage forties MGM musical, perhaps the last example where all the
pieces seem to fit so neatly together.

And then, of
course, there is the Jules Styne score to recommend; Arthur Freed retaining all
but a trio of original songs and hiring Styne to replace them with, arguably, even
better examples of his song-writing prowess; in particular, ‘Better Than a Dream’ – a boisterous
competition number where Dean Martin and Judy Holliday overlap their lyrics as
counterpoint to the burgeoning emotions each has begun to already feel toward
the other. Dean Martin is given the exuberant bachelor’s declaration ‘I Met A Girl’; a song to stops traffic – literally – while Eddie Foy Jr. toddles
along with effete charisma, explaining ‘A
Simple Little System’ to his cronies. Denied the luxury of shooting these
numbers in authentic New York locations, Vincente Minnelli approaches each from
a high angle, filling the Cinemascope frame with cluttered throngs of humanity
instead. Arguably, the best song in the score is ‘Just In Time’, even though the rather sad-eyed, ‘The Party’s Over’ was already the most
celebrated and covered by popular songstresses at the time. The potency in this
pair of ballads is closely met by the gregariously obtuse enthusiasm of ‘Drop That Name’ – arguably, the most
Minnelli-esque moment in the movie.

The song is a
time capsule of fifties celebrity culture, featured in rhyming couplets; names
like Barney Baruch and King Farouk, Alistair Cooke, Lizzie and Eddie; Lucile
Ball and Lauren Bacall, Vivien Leigh, Roz Russell and Freddie all thrown into
the hopper for consideration. Surrounded by Jeffrey’s fair-weather friends,
Ella – a.k.a. Melisande – tries to carve a plausible niche; stepping in and out
of conversations without much success until she resigns to discovering names
she can rhyme with Rin-Tin-Tin; the only star she is able to recall with any
degree of certainty. When the name Ali Khan is thrown her way instead, Ella
merely changes her reply to Ron-Ton-Ton. Aping a pair of mannequins she has
overheard elsewhere in the crowded room, Ella strikes an awkward pose,
declaring “I like things from Kleins…I do
all my shopping there with Mary and Ethel.” Asked to clarify which Mary and
which Ethel, Ella concedes, “Mary
Schwartz and Ethel Hodgekist,” two obvious nobodies in lieu of the other
Marys (Astor and Martin) and Ethels (Barrymore and Waters) being bandied about.
Holliday employs both kinetic and verbal wit to sell this song as authentically
amusing rather than mere silly shtick. And it works – surprisingly well;
Minnelli’s entourage of catty courtiers bedecked in a resplendent assortment of
Walter Plunkett’s costumes; Ella shedding, then shredding the lower half of her
Traviata ball gown to produce a decidedly more streamlined and spangled
ensemble in fire-engine red.

At least in
hindsight, the best to be said for Bells
Are Ringing is that it remains the least pretentious, and arguably, most
fun-loving of MGM’s latter spate of Cinemascope spectacles, typically prone to
glossy grandiloquence in ‘glorious Technicolor’ and ‘stereophonic sound’. There
is none of this in ‘Bells’ - most of its action set against the unremarkable, and
otherwise uninteresting backdrop of Susanswerphone’s dowdy, cluttered and dusty
basement apartment offices; a perfectly nondescript and colorless backdrop for
Judy Holliday’s larger-than-life screen presence to thrive. Yet, Bells Are Ringing is something of a sad
epitaph to a particular way of making movies – and movie musicals in particular
– particularly at MGM. Arguably, no one could have foreseen this would be the
last collaboration between Vincente Minnelli and Arthur Freed – or that Judy
Holliday, who so embodied the role and would go on to revive it again on
Broadway afterward, would be dead a scant five years following the picture’s
release. But like the shifting sands of
time and tastes already to have eroded MGM’s ability to make musicals with any
degree of consistency or success, Bells
Are Ringing gave audiences a final glimpse into what the studio was capable
of when the right creative personnel could still be assembled at a moment’s
notice – all of them under contract, the pistons firing in unison to create
cinema art. Wow! It really did happen… ‘just
in time’!

The Warner
Archive (WAC) Blu-ray release, produced from a Metrocolor (a.k.a. Eastmancolor)
IP of Bells Are Ringing is most
welcomed. Predictably, this disc is up to WAC’s usual high standards; colors
vibrant, contrast bang on, a light smattering of grain and oodles of fine
detail throughout. The main titles, shot under less than studio-controlled
lighting conditions have a slightly softer quality; the plum-colored titles
razor-sharp and glowing. While not as
rich as traditional Technicolor, Metrocolor is nevertheless quite eye-popping.
Dissolves between scenes exhibit transitional amplification of grain in tandem
with loss of color density, but this is to be expected. Contrast is on point: blacks - rich, deep and
solid; whites, clean and bright, though never blooming. Ella’s red Traviata ball
gown is a wowser – saturation maxed out with some startling detail to boot. The
newly remastered DTS 5.1 outperforms anything we have heard in the past: Andre
Previn’s lush orchestral scoring sounds great and vocals are particularly clean
and bright. The one disappointment is extras.
“Just in Time” is an all too
short featurette, providing little more than an overview of the production. We
also get two deleted musical sequences, including Judy Holliday’s ‘Isn’t It A Crime’; another bombastic
set piece for Holliday to mug for the camera: too theatrical for my tastes and
quite unnecessary within the context of the film. Finally, the original
theatrical trailer gets an HD upgrade. Bottom line: Bells Are Ringing on Blu-ray from WAC comes very highly recommended.
You’ll want to snatch this one up…just in time!

Saturday, January 21, 2017

Walt Disney’s
initial flourish of success with Snow
White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937) shocked Hollywood; a town not easily stirred
or even as readily used to such welcomed surprises. Indeed, given the picture’s
financial windfall and the accolades bestowed upon it – including a special
Academy Award with seven miniature statuettes – Walt ought to have been sitting
pretty immediately following the premiere. Alas, Disney was not one to rest on
his laurels; his ambition knowing no limits, and thus, the period to follow
became fraught with varying artistic and financial crises. While Walt concerned
himself with building a campus-styled studio in Burbank to dwarf his cluttered
Hyperion Ave. facilities, his thoughts had already shifted to several valiant
successors to Snow White; his next
animated project, the idealistically mounted Pinocchio (1940). If Snow
White provided Walt with his finest moment of personal satisfaction
(dismissing the critics’ cynical preludes predicting his imminent folly), then Pinocchio would almost affirm their
pessimistic outlook; that Walt had bitten off far more than he could ever chew.
In time, Pinocchio would rightfully be
regarded as Walt’s most technically proficient and artistic masterpiece. Alas,
the luxury of time itself was against Disney in 1940. Believing the kinks
ironed out while feeling his way through the making of Snow White could only benefit and fast track Pinocchio into a more streamlined schedule and budget, regrettably,
work on Pinocchioprogressed at an
excruciating snail’s pace, adding unanticipated costs and stalemates to its
rocky gestation.

With its very
adult and sophisticated themes, in many ways Pinocchio proved to be a much closer cousin to James Whale’s horror
classic, Frankenstein (1932) than a
valiant successor to Snow White; the
story by Carlo Collodi, a harrowing nightmare about the harshness of humanity
pitted against a creature not of this world. In this case, the outcast is a
little boy whose soul is trapped within the whittled wooden shell created by a
skilled woodcarver’s tools. Like Frankenstein,
virtually all of the antagonists in Pinocchioare adult male authority figures – each more devious, divisive and threatening.
Walt generally thrived on adversity. But in the preliminary stages of Pinocchio he quickly felt his animators
had strayed too far from Collodi’s original concept for this figurative and
literal ‘little wooden head’. The
project was put on hold while Walt rethought his concept. Eventually, it was
decided the character’s design should lean considerably toward camouflaging its
puppetry. As such, Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas’ draftsmanship abandoned
Pinocchio’s angular features; the character made more child-like and naïve. The
other character to cause immediate consternation among the Disney artisans was
Jiminy Cricket; in Collodi’s book, taken at face value as an insect. In agreeing
Jiminy ought to survive in the movie (he is callously squashed by
Pinocchio in the book), Walt took it under advisement a cricket, in its literal
form, was not at all appealing to movie audiences. Moreover, it was difficult
to animate. Henceforth, a great deal of time and effort was spent refining
Jiminy’s insect-like features; the head, smoothed out, retaining a light greenish
pallor; his antennae, now more hair-like; his body recreated in miniature human
form; with fingered hands and feet replacing the scaly and elongated talons of
his species.

The
discrepancy in size – a cricket being proportionately nonexistent in the human
world – was resolved by affording Jiminy a good many sequences in close-up; his
role as Pinocchio’s ever-present conscience significantly outranking the
picture’s central protagonist (increasingly becoming the inquisitive to a fault
innocent in chronic need of one); Jiminy given two of the movie’s best songs; Give a Little Whistle, and, the
Oscar-winning When You Wish Upon a Star
(in decades yet to follow, an anthem to all daydreamers and a reoccurring intro
to Walt’s weekly ‘Disneyland’ TV show). The narrative eventually ironed out by
Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman
Penner and Aurelius Battaglia significantly consolidates Collodi’s sprawling
fable, split into three distinct vignettes for the picture: the first, charting
Pinocchio’s (voiced by Dickie Jones) abduction by the co-conspiring fox, Honest
John (Walter Catlett) and cat, Gideon (Mel Blanc), resulting in Pinocchio’s
brief career as an actor in Stromboli’s (Charles Judel) traveling menagerie of
puppets. Apart from a few brief moments where the full wrath of Stromboli is
revealed, this opening vignette is by far the most light-hearted act in the
picture; followed by what may still be the singularly most perverse and
penetrating sequence ever visualized in a Disney animated feature. Pinocchio’s
naïveté is ruthlessly exploited by the delinquent, Lampwick (Frankie Darro); a
‘real’ boy of his own years whom Pinocchio naturally gravitates toward. The boys
are taken by The Coachman (Charles Judel also) to Pleasure Island – seemingly,
a land of amusements where they are encouraged to indulge in some
irreprehensible adolescent decadence without reprisals. To illustrate the
point, given an ounce of encouragement a boy may be corrupted into
self-destruction, Lampwick is eventually transformed into the physical
manifestation of his ‘spirit animal’ - a jackass. The transformation, largely
achieved in silhouette, with a few choice close-ups, is bone-chilling;
Pinocchio about to suffer a similar fate before leaping from a steep cliff, to
avoid capture by the Coachman, and swimming to safety; retaining a set of
mule’s ears and a tail as his own comeuppance.

Pinocchio’s reputation as a bona fide classic today was not so
immediately apparent in 1940; many critics and parents feeling Walt had gone
too far with this Pleasure Island sequence. There is no denying, nothing quite
as monumentally disturbing as it has ever appeared in a Disney feature again.
But perhaps Pinocchio’s lack of
popularity then, was not to be entirely blamed on this brilliantly conceived,
though nevertheless too graphic for most kiddies depiction of past sins coming
to bear on future repercussions. For all its technical proficiency, Pinocchio is a fairly cynical tale; its
seemingly idyllic Tyrolian backdrop dominated by dark and oppressive male
figures (from the bombastic Stromboli to the monolithic Monstro, the whale) who
insidiously seek out and nearly do irrevocable harm to the innocent of the
piece. While Disney movies, Pinocchio
included, would continue to emphasize the strength and endurance of kindness,
in Pinocchio’s case, overt
sentimentality is wholly absent (there are, as example, no cute and fuzzy
woodland animals to gather round and protect; even the solitary and oft fallible
Jiminy, repeatedly falters in his duties to Pinocch’ as ascribed by the Blue
Fairy); his efforts eclipsed by a more grotesque view of societal cruelties at
large. And in the Pleasure Island sequence, Walt distinctly pushes his animators
to probe the macabre to its fullest; the tenuous imbalance between goodness and
evil exposed, suggesting goodness, by its virtue alone, may not always
triumphant over evil and, even more unsettling, when unaccompanied by constant
conscious reasoning, hardly proves to be its own reward; a little too pungent
and profound a statement for most prepubescent palettes to sample, much less
digest.

In the final
sequence, Pinocchio returns home to discover his father, Geppetto (Christian
Rub), has been swallowed up by Monstro, a giant whale, while in search of his
wayward son. Having inadvertently caused this latest catastrophe, Pinocchio is
now presented with a chance to reprieve himself by becoming a catalyst for
goodness in the world. Together with Jiminy, he charts a search and rescue
operation; perhaps not fully aware of the dangers in this penultimate odyssey
or even as determined to overcome them in due course or be damned for trying.
The satisfaction derived from this undiluted self-sacrifice is proof enough to
the Blue Fairy that Pinocchio has earned the right to become a real boy. He is
liberated from the relative shortcomings of wood-carved puppetry, only to
endure the more physically fallible form of flesh and blood. Throughout, Pinnochio features some of the highest
quality animation ever put on film; making extensive use of Disney’s patented multiplane
camera; establishing an uncanny depth in the two dimensional animated world.
From its dizzying descend from a twinkling star in the heavens, soaring over
tiled rooftops and into Geppetto’s cozily lit woodcarver’s shop, to the
writhing tides that sweep briny foam past Monstro’s gaping mouth and leering
eyes as he attempts to swallow Pinocchio and his cohorts whole, Walt’s
attention to every last detail proved an extremely costly endeavor. One sequence
alone, a complex camera zoom over the village lasting barely a few seconds,
added $45,000 to the production costs (more than $300,000 in today’s dollars).
Another pricey decision: Walt electing to add spectral highlights to Geppetto’s
cat, Figaro’s whiskers (in the days before CGI, painstakingly painted frame by
frame onto celluloid). Interestingly, one of the most impressive shots in the
movie also proved the most economical: a steamer crossing the ocean en route to
Pleasure Island, created from a single cell with smoke effects trailing
overhead and distorted glass mimicking the ripple of water below; a moment so
simply created; yet, it drew spontaneous applause from the audience at Pinocchio’s premiere and remains hugely
impressive even today.

To offset the
darkness in Pinocchio’s misadventures, Disney artisans were instructed to make Pinocchio a sublime and ravishingly
handsome visual experience. This, to be sure, has been attained, though at what
price?…certainly, none Walt could afford at the time, encumbered by development
on two more ambitious features; Fantasia
(also to be released in 1940) and Bambi (1942);
also, the construction of his Burbank Studios. In hindsight, while Pinocchio did little except to strain
Walt’s coffers, its everlasting salvation remains Jiminy Cricket. In Collodi’s
original story, Jiminy is rather unceremoniously squashed by Pinocchio before
the real plot even begins. In Disney’s version, Jiminy (voiced with empathetic
perfection by comedian/singer, Cliff Edwards) not only survives, but assumes
the function of deus ex machina (or The Blue Fairy, voiced by Evelyn Venable, imprimatur);
entrusted with our pint-sized protagonist’s salvation from sin. Jiminy is far
from innocent. At varying intervals he even suggests a satirical world-weariness
(hinted to have been a scamp with the ladies, glibly admonishing actors as
lacking a conscience of their own, etc.). As reincarnated by the animators,
Jiminy Cricket takes on an almost Chaplinesque quality, inspiring as the altruism of man, woman and child.

At a cost of
$2 million, Pinocchio is in every
way technically and artistically superior to Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs;
its Oscar-winning ‘When You Wish Upon A
Star’ by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington, earning a reputation as one of
the most iconic ballads in screen history. Regrettably, the movie’s intake at
the box office was barely $3 million; a colossal disappointment and, given the
negative costs to promote and release it, resulting in a net loss of badly
needed profits for the studio; eventually recouped by numerous reissues
throughout decades yet to follow. In hindsight, what Walt seems to have forgotten
with Pinocchio is his audiences were
suckers for love stories and romance. Pinocchiolacks amour; its greatest love between a father and his son. Even so,
Geppetto and Pinocchio’s relationship is not at the crux of our story either; rather,
the impetus to bring about a successful conclusion to its last act finale. Today, it is perhaps easier to appreciate Pinocchio as a departure from the, by now,
oft regurgitated formula inherent in most animated features. Walt would pay dearly for such ‘experimentation’ when Pinocchio’s disappointing returns were
compounded by outright losses on both Fantasia
and Bambi; the studio narrowly
averting financial ruin, commandeered by the U.S. military to produce wartime
propaganda and training shorts; Walt’s permanent retreat into some very
familiar fairy tale territory with the release of Cinderella in 1950 assuring historians a more straight forward antiquity
to deconstruct in their own time. If only audiences had embraced Walt’s
visionary pursuits of perfection then, there is no telling where the art of
animation might have gone after Pinocchio’s
debut. Instead, Walt found it increasingly impossible, and quite unproductive
to challenge his audience, seemingly incapable of embracing the level of
artistic genius he had so delicately wrought.

So, here we go
again: Disney Inc. re-issuing Pinocchio
on Blu-ray as part of their newly re-branded ‘Signature Series’. Some
years ago, I wrote extensively on the end of the company’s self-imposed moratorium
marketing ploy, whereupon classic animated features are made available only for
a limited time on home video before being retired back into ‘the vaults’ –
thus, increasing the hype and need for reissue to a whole new generation six or
seven years later. This worked
spectacularly well when VHS was the format du jour. After all, tapes wear out
at an alarming rate; especially when overplayed by parents seeking to
anesthetize their kids for a few hours in front of the boob tube; even more
when manhandled by kiddies with less acumen for their hygienic preservation. The
moratorium model was arguably even feasible during the DVD era, primarily as
the company seemed to attack all subsequent reissues by topping off the extras;
a bare bones release given ‘special’, then ‘deluxe’ treatments. But then came
Blu-ray with its promise of perfection the first time out, and, the porting
over of virtually all the goodies previously available on other home video
formats. Once restored and remastered in hi-def, the criteria for another reissue
became not only a challenge (what more via extras could be added to entice a
repurchase?) but rather moot, as properly cared for Blu-rays can last for many
generations; making the purchase of new discs obsolete.

This
repackaged release of Pinocchio,
while sporting new cover art, appears to contain the same 1.33:1 pristine image
of its hi-def predecessor; Pinocchio
last having appeared on retail shelves in 2009. Then, as now, the image has
been effectively scrubbed of virtually all its indigenous grain and age-related
artifacts. A lot was made of the fact Pinocchionow does not resemble what Pinocchio
looked like in 1940. While I have to agree a lot of digital tinkering and pixie
dust have generally taken the film-esque quality away from this presentation;
it has nevertheless been replaced by a flawless - if ever so slightly
homogenized - image that is pretty hard to resist; vibrant colors, exquisite
levels of contrast and fine detail, in some cases revealing brush strokes in
the original painted backdrops. Age-related artifacts are nonexistent. It all
looks very good indeed, particularly for audiences accustomed to our present
era of razor-sharp video vs. film stock. The 7.1 DTS audio is also a
revelation; the film’s score benefiting the most from this upgrade. It should
be pointed out that apart from the last act, Pinocchio’s showdown with Monstro,
there is very little need or use of the expanded sound field; dialogue front
and center with only the subtlest hints of spatial separation in orchestral underscore
and SFX. For purists, we also get the restored DTS 1.0 mono.

As before: Pinocchiocan be viewed 3 different
ways: (1) in its original theatrical version (2) or with its black pillarboxing
bars replaced by Toby Bluth’s artwork (DisneyView), and finally, (3) in Sing-Along
mode with subtitled lyrics during the songs. New to Blu: The Pinocchio Project: When You
Wish Upon a Star: a behind-the-scenes look at a new music video
featuring Alex G, Tanner Patrick, and JR Aquino. There’s also Walt’s
Story Meetings: Pleasure Island in which Pixar director, Pete Docter
and Disney historian, J. B. Kaufman discuss Walt’s process in refining this
sequence (originally titled ‘Boobyland’). Finally, we get In Walt’s Words; an assemblage
of archival recordings and interviews from 1956. The rest of the extras are holdovers
from the original 70th Anniversary release, and it is gratifying to
see the Mouse House did not jettison these as they had previously done on
virtually all the vintage extras for their Beauty
& The Beast: Signature Edition reissue. Badly done, in my opinion! Herein,
we get the nearly hour-long No Strings
Attached: The Making of Pinocchio, a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look
at this Disney classic; ten plus minutes of deleted scenes; a six minute
featurette on Walt’s refining process, and, interviews with toy makers who have
a strong kinship to Geppetto. There is
also the ‘reference footage’; almost ten minutes of live action film used to
help the animators get into their characters. Add to this a new ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’ music video,
several trailers and promos for Disney’s pending releases of the live-action Beauty and the Beast and Moana and there it is. For those who
already own the previous Blu-ray of Pinocchio,
I really cannot see the point in this upgrade. However, if you never bothered
to pick up this superior example of Walt’s high-classic animation style, then
it is high time to add Pinocchioto
your collection with the company’s ‘Signature series’ reissue. Bottom line:
highly recommended!

Thursday, January 19, 2017

It was a
stroke of genius casting Audrey Hepburn in Terence Young’sWait Until Dark (1967); a psychological thriller, far more engaging
for its winsome ingénue than its trio of would-be brutes, intermittently
succumbing to lugubrious apoplexy between bungling their relatively
straight-forward interception and recovery of a certain porcelain-faced doll
into which several packets of heroin have been stitched. By happenstance, the
doll is misdirected to the basement apartment of a blind woman who, quite
simply, refuses to surrender to the plotters and is smarter than all three of
these embryonic assassins put together. Wait
Until Dark is, of course, based of Frederick Knott’s Broadway play, itself
problematically structured around the long-suffering Suzy Hendrix (Hepburn);
newly blinded and thus still learning how to cope with her condition. Suzy’s
husband, Sam (Erfem Zimbalist Jr.) is empathetic to a point, yet determined his
usually independent-minded and free-spirited wife re-gain the courage to be
self-reliant. Brit-born Knott, who only wrote three plays in his lifetime, two
made into memorable movies (this, and the other being, Hitchcock’s adaptation
of Dial M for Murder 1954) always
regarded Wait Until Darkas his chef-d'oeuvre.
Despite enough holes in the plot to put a block of fine-aged Swiss to shame, Wait Until Dark clung together
spectacularly on the stage with Lee Remick in a Tony-nominated lead on Broadway
in 1966, and Honor Blackman (my favorite Bond girl, Pussy Galore), reprising it
for London’s West End. Yet, as fine as each lady is (at least, elsewhere in
their respective movie careers), in viewing this picture today, it is virtually
impossible to consider anyone except Audrey Hepburn as the terrorized victim;
her frozen stares (the result of Hepburn’s fine-tuning an approach to convey
blindness by attending a school for the visually impaired, and learning Braille
to augment her reflections), utterly convincing of the affliction, while still
managing to emanate appropriate pathos and tension in tandem as propriety, the
script, and this venomous game of cat and mouse perpetuated by Roat (Alan
Arkin), by far the most lethal and psychotic of the cohorts, permits.

Wait Until Darkhails from a long and oft
distinguished traditional of ‘women in
peril’ to have made and popularized martyrs out of some of the biggest
glamour queens in show biz; Barbara Stanwyck (Sorry, Wrong Number 1948), Joan Crawford (Sudden Fear, 1952), and, Doris Day (Midnight Lace 1960) among them. Wait Until Dark is, in fact, the final jewel in Audrey’s crown; her
farewell to the movies for almost a decade to focus more astutely on aspects in
her life that mattered more; the rearing of son, Sean (the offspring of her
marriage to actor, Mel Ferrer – who produced Wait Until Dark and whom Hepburn would divorce a year after the
picture’s release) and charitable work for which, arguably, Audrey is as fondly
remembered today. “I suppose people could
blame me for ending Audrey Hepburn's career,” Sean has admitted, “She knew her potential. If she had kept
working, the parts were there for her, and her success professionally would
have continued at a high level for years. But she wanted to be with her family.
She wanted a private life. And she couldn't bear the thought that she might
fail as a mother. It was too important to her.” With the exception of Marilyn
Monroe and perhaps Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn’s iconography remains the most
resilient and readily resurrected by today’s spate of leading ladies in
Hollywood (desperate to cash in on her inimitable loveliness, alas
reconstituted as mere affectation without actually being gracious themselves)
and wannabe daydreaming teenage girls who perennially submit to the worship of
her recurrently salubrious and never dating sophistication. Wait Until Darkstrips away the
superficiality of Hepburn’s trademarked stardom; the clothes, as
example, are off the rack Parisian cast offs (Hepburn spends most of the
picture in cozily frumpish outfits); not the uber-chichi, head-turning runway
apparel ofCount Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy for whom it can justly be
said each had become the other’s muse by the late 1960's.

Wait Until Darkis undeniably Hepburn’s movie,
despite the fact she does not appear in it for the first 21 minutes. Even so,
the entire plot is built around her character’s increasingly nerve-jangling
isolation and burgeoning resourcefulness against a trio of would-be assassins
come to call one dark and stormy night. Yet, Alan Arkin manages a minor coup;
to distinguish himself in relief from his cohorts with a decidedly delicious
bit of ‘out of the box’ acting. Interestingly, producers had a hell of a time
trying to cast this part; firstly, because none of the actors approached wanted
to be known professionally for having brutalized the beloved Audrey Hepburn;
even in play-acting jest. Alan Arkin would later quip how easy it was for him
to get the part. And from our first introduction to Harry Roat, Arkin
establishes a rare, unsettling quality along the lines of Shakespeare’s
classically derived declaration – “he
that smiles may smile and be a villain”. There is a slithery decadence to
his nasally annunciations as he tempts and taunts con artist, Mike Talman
(Richard Crenna) and his disgraced cop/cohort, Sergeant Carlino (Jack Weston)
into accepting his terms and conditions in the doll’s recovery; a wicked sense
of the theatrical after he dons several disguises (rather pointless,
considering Suzy is blind) to cajole, then intimidate her into divulging the
doll’s secret hiding place. As a pledge of good faith, or rather to prove he
means business, Harry Roat lets Mike and Carlino discover the body of their New
York contact, Lisa (Samantha Jones), left to hang in Suzy’s apartment closet.
Arkin’s breed of villainy is not immediately apparent; not until he quietly
encourages Mike and Carlino to put their weapons on the table while refusing to
relinquish rights to ‘Geraldine’ – a stylish, jade-handled switchblade whom
Roat suggests will serve as mediator in their negotiations.

Throughout
most of Wait Until DarkArkin gives
every indication Roat is an exacting sadist; a real monster to be reckoned with
and never to be crossed. Yet Arkin resists the obviousness built into the part.
There is something decidedly tantalizing about him; magnetism not usually
ascribed the villain. Only during the picture’s last act does Arkin’s perverse
ne’er-do-well revert to the precepts – nee clichés – of pure and undiluted
screen evil; leaping from the darkened recesses of the room and spewing menace
as Suzy retaliates by dousing him in gasoline, threatening to ignite the spark
that will send his wickedness up like a tinderbox. The oft overlooked
performance in the picture belongs to pint-sized 10 year old child actress,
Julie Harrod as Suzy’s upstairs neighbor and uber-smart moppet, Gloria. After
some initial jealousies, the girls establish a bond; Gloria becoming devoted to
Suzy and, in fact, taking possession of the doll while Suzy prepares for a
little cloak and dagger with her arch nemeses. Harrod, who quit acting after
only one other appearance, and went on to champion environmentalist causes in
San Francisco, herein plays the seemingly unloved and abandoned ‘homely’ girl
nobody except a blind woman would want to be friends. It’s the camaraderie
between Suzy and Gloria that generally raises the stakes and the tension in Wait Until Dark’s third act; Gloria,
innocuously maneuvering in and out of the brownstone right under Roat’s nose.

We tip our
hats to Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington for their screenplay, a vast
improvement on Frederick Knott’s rather weighty one-act premise, superbly
divided into three herein. Wait Until
Darkopens with a prologue in Montreal. Succinctly, we are introduced to
Lisa (Samantha Jones), a drug courier nervously waiting for her handler, Louie
(Jean Del Val) to finish stitching heroin packets into the slit back skirts of
a child’s antique doll. Under the credits we follow Lisa on her flight from
Canada to New York City, sensing something gone terribly awry as Lisa spies a
mysterious man waiting for her at the airport. By coincidence, she befriends
fellow passenger, Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) whom she implores to look
after the doll until such time as they are reunited in the near future. Given
the curiosity of their ‘cute meet’, Sam willingly – and almost unquestioningly –
agrees to keep the doll safe. He might have first inquired what an adult woman
is doing, protectively coddling this Victorian antique in the first place. No
sooner has Lisa handed over the merchandise then she is manhandled and taken
into custody by the mystery man. We follow Sam back to his brownstone on the
lower east side; our first introduction to Suzy – the champion blind lady,
still acclimatizing herself to the permanent loss of sight caused earlier that
year by a horrific auto accident. A photographer by trade, Sam is called away
on assignment, leaving Suzy to fend for herself.

The next
afternoon, Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston), Lisa’s
contacts in the Big Apple, arrive at the Hendrix apartment, mistakenly assuming
it to be Lisa’s. Picking the lock and letting themselves in the pair can find
no trace of the heroin doll; their frantic search ambushed by the arrival of
the sinister, Harry Roat Jr. (Alan Arkin). Roat enjoys toying with them. Clearly,
he has the upper hand. Casually, Roat encourages Mike and Carlino to continue
conducting their search while suggesting the doll is not among these
belongings. Roat lays out a scenario; an exchange, actually – offering to cut
Mike and Carlino in on a percentage from the sale of the heroin. To prove he
means business – Roat directs the men’s search to the bedroom closet where Mike
makes the grisly discovery of Lisa’s remains zipped into a semi-translucent carry-on
bag hanging on the door. After a few taut moments, Mike and Carlino strike a
truce with Roat. But the particulars of their arrangement are cut short when
Suzy returns to the apartment unexpectedly. Although her sixth sense
immediately kicks in, hinting she is not alone, Suzy is too trusting to comprehend
she has just stumbled into a den of cutthroats. After Suzy has gone, Roat
blackmails Mike and Carlino into disposing of Lisa’s body under the cover of
night.

The next day,
Roat sets into motion his plan to case the apartment, sending Sam on a dead end
photographic assignment in Asbury Park in New Jersey. As he will be gone for
quite some time, Roat now launches into his intricate plan to get Suzy to
confess to the whereabouts of the doll. Mike poses as an old friend of Sam’s,
ingratiating himself to Suzy. Implicitly, Suzy comes to trust Mike and he
begins to harbor a modicum of sympathy for her, particularly after he coaxes
Suzy to admit Sam brought the doll back to the apartment from the airport. She
explains how a woman later telephoned to make inquiries about the doll but that
when both she and Sam began to look through his luggage for it, the doll had
already mysteriously vanished into thin air. Mike believes Suzy’s story. Now,
Carlino applies less subtle pressure to get Suzy to divulge the whereabouts of
the doll. He asks if Suzy has heard about the murder of a woman and the
discovery of her body in a nearby abandoned field. Carlino then connects the
dots, suggesting the doll as a vital clue in the case; Sam’s last chance to be
cleared of the suspicion of murder. Finally, Roat stages an elaborate hoax, donning
several disguises and pretending, first to be an old man, and later, his as erratic
son. Roat puts the fear of God into Suzy who wastes no time telephoning Carlino
to report the incident.

Mike returns
to find Suzy terrorized and alone. Presumably as a comfort, he gives her the
number for the phone booth across the street, claiming it as his own; then,
falsely forewarns a police car is already stationed outside, waiting to nab Sam
upon his return home. Alas, daylight has begun to glimmer for Suzy. She now
suspects Carlino and Roat are in cahoots. In the meantime, Gloria – a lonely
girl living upstairs in the brownstone – and Suzy’s only real contact with the
outside world, confesses to having stolen the doll earlier from Sam’s luggage.
Remorsefully, she returns it to the apartment. Grateful, Suzy asks if the
police cruiser Mike told her about is still stationed outside. Gloria explains
no police car was ever outside the apartment, thus elevating Suzy’s paranoia.
The girls work out a code, Gloria to quietly observe the phone booth across the
street and send a signal to Suzy if it is in use. After Carlino makes yet
another impromptu visit to the apartment, Gloria sends a signal; then, another after
Suzy has telephoned Mike to inform him of her recovery of the doll. Realizing
too late Mike is also in on the con, Suzy hides the doll. Thus, when Mike hurriedly
arrives to collect it, quietly trailed by Roat and Carlino, Suzy lies about it
being at Sam’s studio. To ensure Suzy cannot contact anyone else while they are
gone to investigate her claim, Roat severs the telephone wire. Roat and Mike
leave for Sam’s studio, leaving Carlino to stand guard outside the building. Now,
Suzy hurries Gloria to the bus station to forewarn Sam, due home this evening.

When Suzy
discovers the cut telephone wires she prepares for a showdown, breaking all the
light bulbs in the apartment and thus plunging everyone into the discomfort of
her own blindness. She pours some of Sam’s photographic chemicals into a large
bowl. When Mike returns he suddenly realizes Suzy has unearthed the truth. He
demands to know the whereabouts of the doll. But Suzy refuses to cooperate. Having
spent more time with her than the others, Mike has come to admire her fortitude
and craftiness. In a last ditch effort to win Suzy’s confidence, Mike admits they
are all working together as she suspected. He implies her only hope of
surviving is to give him the doll. Besides, he has already taken steps to do
away with Roat; Carlino waiting in the abandoned parking lot across the street
to finish him off. Alas, both men have underestimated Roat, who easily kills Carlino
by running him over, before doubling back on foot to knife Mike in the back
just as he is about to momentarily leave Suzy’s apartment. Intent on acquiring
the doll, Roat chains the door shut and pours gasoline on the floor, setting a piece
of newspaper on fire. Suzy feigns surrender until Roat has extinguished the
open flame. Now, she douses him in the bowl of photographic chemicals at arm’s
length and desperately unplugs the one remaining light in the room. Roat lights
a match to see what has become of Suzy, but is visibly shaken when Suzy, having
discovered his canister of gasoline, begins indiscriminately splashing its
contents everywhere.

Roat discovers
the one light in the room Suzy has overlooked, propping the refrigerator door
open to guide him to her. Having lost the struggle, Suzy relinquishes the doll
to Roat who now leads her to the bedroom, presumably to rape her. Instead, she
reveals herself to be in possession of a knife taken from the kitchen, severely
injuring Roat. He lunges and begins to claw his way back to her. These final
moments prompted Warner’s publicity of the day to issue a gimmicky press
release regarding the dimming of all lights in the theater to enhance the ‘terror’ of a blind woman’s eternal
blackness. In a theater the effect was appropriately uncanny; a little less so
when viewing the movie at home, even in a completely darkened room. What does
endure are the relentless and seminal performances given by both Hepburn and
Arkin; the former, filled with enough heart-palpitating panic to quicken more
than a few pulses; the latter, doggedly teeming with rage, the full breadth of
his psychotic venom on display as Roat, grimaced and dying, tries to plunge the
knife recovered from his own wound into this screaming blind girl,
claustrophobically wedged between her fridge and the wall. We hear a
blood-curdling cry as Suzy unplugs the fridge, pitching the rest of us into the
murky darkness; followed by an interminable silence. Sam, Gloria and the police
predictably arrive too late to have an impact one way or the other; relieved to
discover a shell-shocked, though otherwise unharmed Suzy sobbing in the corner
with Roat’s body lying nearby.

Wait Until Dark continues to hold up
spectacularly well despite some truck-sized loopholes in its plot; chiefly, why
Roat should fear no reprisals in applying pressure to two small-time, though nevertheless
seasoned cons, yet endures Suzy’s cat and mouse games that drag out the
inevitable discovery of the doll. Also, Roat donning not one but two disguises
to ‘fool’ Suzy is more than a bit
overplayed. Remember, he had no compunction about rather crudely doing away
with Lisa. But Suzy is, after all, quite blind and therefore unable to
appreciate all of Roat’s theatrical efforts at camouflage. Masterfully, it is
the performances that keep these feeble-minded twists afloat. The cast is uniformly
solid and apart from Arkin’s brief interludes into absurd mania, his Roat Jr.
is as well-oiled, bone-chilling and utterly perverse as any screen villain thus
far come to our silver screens. I can still hear his velvety smooth and
slightly effete inquiry, “Where’s the
doll, Suzy?” – Arkin’s unusual, almost sing-song punctuation reaching all
the way to the back of the house with a slithery cynicism that damn well means
business. Uncorking Roat’s pressurized craziness in act three is slightly
deflating. Arkin is far more effective when he skates on the very thin edge of
volatility, generating a queer uncertainty in both his contemporaries and the
audience at large. Wait Until Darkwas a huge hit for all concerned. Produced by Hepburn’s hubby, Mel Ferrer, as a
means to restore the foundations of their crumbling marriage, the picture’s
popularity would outlast the couple’s vows by several decades; Hepburn and
Ferrer separating before the year and divorcing soon thereafter. Viewed today, Wait Until Darkremains creepily
enjoyable for a good night’s scare; a real ‘reel’ midnight movie classic. Let’s
be immodest here. No time spent basking in the intangible screen luminosity of
the ethereal Audrey Hepburn is ever wasted. She trades in the magic of screen
glamour herein for guts; a quality the lady herself possessed in spades in life.
It’s a fair trade and just as richly rewarding to behold on the screen.

Thanks to the
Warner Archive we no longer have to ‘wait
until dark’ to enjoy this minor masterpiece. WAC has gone to the mat again,
with a remastered image derived from an interpositive. How does it look? In a
word – glorious! One of the most worthwhile aspects of our present ‘digital age’
has been re-experiencing the past we only thought we knew, or perhaps never
knew (if we were not old enough to see these flicks theatrically), represented
in hi-def with clarity to rival – and occasionally even surpass – what we might
have seen in theaters. Wait Until Darkon
Blu-ray sports a clarity and crispness surely to be appreciated. Film grain
appears indigenous to its source and colors are so subtly nuanced and accurate,
watching this disc up-rezed at 4K gave me the illusion of looking through a
pane glass window into the Hendrix’s dingy little flat where very bad things
are about to occur. Flesh tones are appropriately wan, given its New York in
winter, and the sparsely employed bolder colors register as they should.
Tonality and contrast are superb. The mono audio has been lovingly preserved in
DTS 2.0. Extras are limited to a vintage featurette with Mel Ferrer and Alan
Arkin; too brief but welcomed nevertheless and theatrical trailers. Bottom
line: Wait Until Dark is a treasure
soon to be rediscovered on Blu-ray by film lovers everywhere. Another winner
from WAC. Permit us to worship and give thanks…many, many thanks!

Monday, January 16, 2017

Few romantic
comedies treat their adult subjects as adults; fewer still, willing to go out
on a limb and explore what happens after the wedding bands have been properly
affixed to the appropriate fingers. For one reason or another, Hollywood has
always suffered from the chronic fairy tale affliction and myth that suggests ‘…and they lived happily ever after’
once the bloom of love has progressed from ‘cute
meet’ to wedding chapel. T’ain’t necessarily so, according to Stanley
Donen’s magnificent (and at least in its own time, stupendously underrated) Two For The Road (1967); a unique and
wholly refreshing take on the slow, often morose disintegration of these
fanciful notions about love and a life. Two
For the Road is, at least in hindsight, a breakout movie; using the
nonlinear narrative to chart the course of a pair of reluctant lovers who meet
neither cute nor with their fifty shades of lust generally ascribed to the
proverbial ‘hot-blooded’ romance; the
narrative, juxtaposing a veritable potpourri of snapshots from their awkward
first encounter to penultimate struggle in re-discovering meaning from their meandering
and occasionally severely bungled lives. Each has an extramarital affair along
the way. Ultimately, however, despite whatever differences, disappointments,
elation and sins come their way, here are two for the proverbial road of life;
perfectly mated if imperfectly matched.

The project
has the mark of Stanley Donen’s originality to recommend it; also the ideal
casting of Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn as Mark Wallace and his wife,
Joanna; a superb score by Henry Mancini and Oscar-nominated screenplay from
Frederic Raphael. In hindsight, the pieces seem to fit so succinctly, it is
shocking just how close the picture came to never being made. Donen’s clout in
Hollywood was considerable; a visionary in the director’s chair, who had begun
innocuously as a contract dancer, brought from Broadway’s cast of Best Foot Forward by MGM; his services
eventually picked up by star, Gene Kelly and graduating with seeming
effortlessness from choreographer to director, along the way creating some of
the studio’s most beloved musicals, including On the Town, Singin’ in the
Rain (1952), Seven Brides for Seven
Brothers (1954) and Funny Face
(1957, and made at Paramount). When musicals fell out of fashion, Donen simply
applied his craftsmanship to other genres; most notably, the light romantic
comedy, but also showing off his creativity in a startlingly good Hitchcockian
thriller, Charade (1963). Still,
Donen could find no takers in Hollywood to produce Two For the Road. Worse, early on it looked as though Audrey Hepburn
would not commit to the picture, despite having enjoyed working with Donen on
the aforementioned Funny Face.
Evidently, she believed the concept – as pitched by Donen over the phone long
distance - and before Raphael had actually completed his script – simply would
not work.

Donen was
undaunted – I would suggest ‘relentless’ – in his pursuit of Hepburn, even
flying to Switzerland to implore her the movie could only be done with her
participation. At this point, Donen had already secured a tentative arrangement
with Universal Pictures; the deal eventually falling through and leaving Donen
perplexed and frustrated until Richard Zanuck and David Brown agreed to back
the picture over at 2oth Century-Fox. Mercifully, Hepburn loved the script and
her cache, along with Donen’s provided the impetus for Fox to push it on ahead.
In casting Albert Finney, Donen made a risky choice. Although Finny had carved
a name for himself in his native England immediately following the release of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960) he was an unknown quantity in America, more so as he would be expected
to play an American. Two For the Road’s
narrative structure is slightly gimmicky, though eloquently reformulated in the
editing process to provide the audience with an ingeniously stitched together
travelogue through this marital relationship, complicated by waning love and
missed opportunities, nearly torn asunder by lust, boredom, frustration and
periodic feuds over money, lack of intimacy, child-rearing, etc. Donen begins
his sojourn in the middle of this multifaceted, if unsatisfactory partnership;
then grows the story out in all directions, finding causal links in Raphael’s
narrative passages to provide us with visuals that are completely logical as
excised in the nonlinear progression.

Life is
undeniably a succession of events from points ‘A’ to ‘B’. But the luxury of
memory often clouds this chronology with regressions – fond and otherwise –
from the not so distant past; haunting the peripheries and bringing everything to
the present with a considerable amount of convolution, afterthought, and
occasional clarity. In visualizing Raphael’s story, Donen’s imperative was
every moment in the picture should be viewed as the present; in other words,
despite the TripTik through various snapshots from this knotty love affair
turned occasionally harsh, then exuberantly romantic, Two For the Road’s métier would illustrate each segment as though
it were happening right now for the audience. Miraculously, the effect is never
jarring or off putting; the stars sufficiently aged and/or regressed in their
actual age to play younger than they are. In some ways, Two For the Road is a tragedy, while in others, an enthusiastic
test of endurance for this couple, put through the paces of the proverbial
thick and thin (in sickness and in health…for better or worse…yada, yada, yada)
taking the curves and roadblocks in stride. In essence, it’s a ‘road picture’. Nearly all of its action
takes place in a car – or rather – ‘cars’, as Mark’s affluence as a budding
architect begins to take hold – the couple on a perpetual and ever-evolving
holiday drive through the south of France.

We only ever
see Mark and Joanna in their spare time, unencumbered by the grind of a nine to
five. Curiously, they are largely friendless; Mark relying on his work to keep
him focused and occupied/Joanna maintaining the façade of a doting wife and
mother, while increasingly unhappy in either lot in life. Alas, this journey is
anything but a lark and a spree. There are two reoccurring motifs in the
picture; the first, Mark perpetually mislaying his passport, inevitably never
too far from Joanna’s grasp. “If there’s
one thing I can’t stand, it’s an efficient woman,” he bristles with
coyness, rarely with affection, and usually to suggest contempt. The second
motif actually begins the film, as a brusque Mark and disenchanted Joanna wait
inside an airport terminal. "What kind of people can sit across
from one another and say nothing to each other?" a forlorn Joanna
inquires. "Married people,"
says Mark sternly. Joanna telephones home to check in on their daughter,
Carolyn (Kathy Chelimsky); Mark so absorbed in his portfolio he momentarily is
unable to connect with the name as Joanna hands him the telephone to say
something nice to their child. Two For
the Roadis revelatory in the way it analyzes these awkwardly mated
individuals. There is no judgement call. Neither is entirely to blame for what
follows; the yin and yang in their turbulent follies never suggesting a ‘head over heels’ affaire de coeur; the
arc in their emotional evolution from passing strangers to convenient lovers
and finally, frustrated marrieds, creating a naturalized friction that anyone
in any relationship for more than six months will instantly be able to
recognize and relate to on a multitude of levels.

Donen intrudes
with his first carefully-timed vignette: the first time Mark saw Joanna aboard
a ship bound for France. His passing fascination as she shoots him a somewhat
accusatory stare from a lower balcony is later compounded when he panics over
his mislaid passport. She comes to his aid, discovering it all in his
knapsack. It is an inauspicious
beginning. But sometime later, their paths cross again; Joanna now a part of a
travelling girls’ choir, catching a glimpse of Mark from the back of their VW
bus, lazily bumming a ride on the back of a hay wagon. Distracted by Mark’s
good looks, the bus’ driver, Pat (Judy Cornwell) veers off the side of the
road, leaving Mark to come to their rescue; hardly a gallant gesture. At first,
he almost willingly ignores their dilemma with amusement, before convincing the
wagon’s driver to hitch his tractor and tow them from their rut. In return, the
girls give Mark a ride into town, the new designated driver, Jackie (Jacqueline
Bisset) becoming immediately attracted and flirtatious. Too bad the entire
troop is stricken with chicken pox; everyone except Mark and Joanna, who have
already had it as children. Mark would have preferred to spend a few ours alone
with Jackie over Joanna and she knows it. He lacks imagination. Now, his wandering feet itch to move on.
Kismet: Joanna endeavors to become his travelling companion.

Mark really
isn’t up to it. However, unable to come up with at least one good reason why
they should not continue on together, Mark instead decides to make their
journey as marginally unpleasant for Joanna as he can; cracking oversimplified
sexist statements about a woman’s ambitions for a man and casting generalized
responsibility for all men’s unhappiness squarely at the high-heeled shoes of
all women, to which Joanna astutely comments, “Who was she?” Indeed, Mark has been wounded by a previous amour.
He is bitter with a sizable chip on his shoulders; his defenses and his dander
up: hardly any woman’s ideal. Still, there is something refreshingly affecting
about him. The pair pauses in a small town so Mark can photograph the exquisite
architecture of a century-old church. Joanna is oblivious to the fact Mark
doesn’t want her in the picture – figuratively and literally. Simultaneously,
both assume correctly what the other is thinking, Mark explaining his camera
has been designed to document three dimensional objects. “I’m three dimensional,” Joanna coyly persists. “I meant buildings,” Mark insists. “Well, I’m not a building,” she
begrudgingly admits.

A short while
later, Mark and Joanna come to a parting of the ways. Mark suggests the reason
they have not been successful at bumming a ride is because they are together. A
passerby is much more apt to pick up a hitchhiker if there is only one.
Reluctantly, Joanna agrees and very quickly she manages to land herself a ‘ride
for one’ along this open road. However, she takes pity on Mark, appearing from behind
a construction sign post a short piece up the road and quite suddenly earns his
respect. After all, she has sacrificed her own comfort to be with him. This too
will be a reoccurring theme in the plot, Joanna’s increasing unhappiness,
mostly inflicted by Mark’s burgeoning career with wealthy builder, Maurice
Dalbret (Claude Dauphin). But first, we are introduced to Mark’s old flame, nee
– the girl who done him wrong back when, Cathy Seligman (Eleanor Bron), now
married to a level-headed/philosophy espousing accountant, Howard
Maxwell-Manchester (William Daniels). Embracing the child-rearing liberalism of
Dr. Spock, the two have a thoroughly spoilt daughter, Ruthie Belle (Gabrielle
Middleton); a little monster who dictates the particulars of their
tension-riddled road trip shared with Joanna and Mark. The brat tosses the keys
out the car window, repeatedly embarrasses Howard with her accusatory line of
questioning and enjoys pinching Cathy to the point of inflicting pain. “You still want to have a child?” Mark
mutters beneath his breath. “Yes, I still
want a child,” Joanna insists, “I
just don’t want that child!”

Before they
were married Mark and Joanna had agreed they would not become parents. But now
Joanna’s biological clock is ticking and Mark begrudgingly agrees to sire an
offspring. Although Carolyn is well brought up and behaved, she nevertheless
adds yet another layer of dissatisfaction to their marriage...at least, for
Mark, who by now considers married life a nuisance and detriment to his
career. Mark and Joanna met Maurice and
his wife, Francoise (Nadia Gray) while they were struggling to make ends meet;
the road trip nearly turned disastrous when Mark’s MG caught fire. Mercifully,
Mark and Joanna escaped unharmed, taken into the comfort of the posh country
retreat where their car stalled and burst into a hellish ball of flames. Unable
to afford both their meals and room, Mark smuggles fruit and canned goods into
their suite until the insurance company can square away the details. Not long
thereafter, Mark and Maurice become partners, leading to even more time spent
away from Joanna: also, an afternoon dalliance with Simone (Karyn Balm) - a
playful sex bomb who races Mark along the open road in her convertible, the two
eventually meeting at a remote hotel. Mark’s affair is one of the cruelest
vignettes in Two For the Road;
played as pantomime with Mark’s voice over narrating a letter he has supposedly
written to Joanna, proclaiming not only his fidelity, but also how he longs to
return to her at the earliest possible convenience.

Tensions brew
at Maurice’s estate, Joanna bored and feeling neglected, taking up with one of
the couple’s intimate friends, David (Georges Descrières). Mark is wounded by
this infidelity. Joanna returns to his side, tearful and chaste, only to be
admonished by Mark after a series of passionate and redemptive kisses. “Are you sure you know which one I am?”
he coolly inquires. Joanna’s heart is shattered. She races from the room,
pursued by Mark who clumsily topples into the pool in his pursuit of her. Not
long thereafter, the couple attends one of Maurice’s chichi parties; Joanna
momentarily reunited with David and Mark becoming jealous once more; taking up
with Sylvia (Dominique Joos); a random girl he grabs off the dance floor. Mark
playfully introduces Maurice to Sylvia as his fiancée, insisting he has left
Joanna once and for all. But only a few moments later, David and Joanna intrude
on the lie; Joanna explaining David is engaged to Sylvia. At this point,
Maurice is utterly confused. Indeed, he has his own wrinkles to iron out on a
new construction project giving him grief; one he intends to inveigle Mark into
yet again, thereby sacrificing his relationship with Joanna. An impromptu power
failure provides the perfect escape; Mark and Joanna disappearing in the dark. “I love you Joanna,” Mark confides on
the car ride home. “Well, then,” she
quietly insists, recognizing that whatever pain each has inflicted on the
other, ultimately their bond is marked by a genuine commitment that keeps them
coming back for more.

Two For the Road is extraordinary in so many
intangibly truthful ways it is difficult to quantify them all with any degree
of critical clarity in brief. Any proper analysis of the film would have to
begin by deconstructing Mark Wallace; incredibly selfish, driven, obsessed with
being successful – at the expense of becoming a mensch – and usually concerned
only with his own satisfaction. There is really nothing about this man any
woman in her right mind should find endearing. And yet, Albert Finney manages
an incredible coup. He wins us over with an undercurrent of conflicted
insincerity. Part of Mark’s appeal is Finney’s good looks; blonde and blue-eyed
and exuding independently-minded masculine virility; the kind that generally
proves catnip to all women, goaded by ego-driven machismo and a turbo-charged
engine of self-appointed/testosterone-infused vanity. Nevertheless, Finney lures us into his court
in other unexpected ways. Mark is a fellow utterly misguided in his intent, but
ultimately with a soft center buried somewhere beneath his genuinely caustic
and occasionally imperious outer shell; his brutal aloofness coming across as a
defense mechanism. And Finney, lest we forget, even in his youth, is an actor
of rare qualities. While some actors rely on their eyes or vocal capabilities
to convey more intimate thoughts and ideas, Finney is using the full-faculty of
his free-form body politics to get across and sell the notion Mark Wallace
really is not a bad apple or a gross pig of a human being, despite leaning –
occasionally with desperation – toward that end of the guy’s guy spectrum. It’s
the internalized conflict Finney gives us that translates so intoxicatingly well
and salvages our opinion of Mark as just someone stumbling through the
emotional content of his character, discovering some unexpected surprises for
himself along the way.

Audrey
Hepburn’s Joanna is far from the love-struck little lamb or sex-driven viper a
la her counterpart, Jackie. Jackie might have given Mark a real run for his
money and made his life a complication full of reckoning. Joanna is less
resolved to chase after Mark as a woman and far more interested in pursuing him
as her equal. She is fascinated by his byzantine struggle to make meaning from
a lonely life, perhaps partly because it appeals to her mothering instinct, but
moreover, because she too is a very complicated lady of substance and brains.
She wants Mark, but not enough to make him want her back. He has to come to
this decision on his own and in his own good time. But Hepburn’s Joanna is
willing to wait, and not about to let the interim pass without exploring other
options along the way. Yet, even her affair with David is not meant to make
Mark jealous; rather, to quell a temporary frustration in their marriage. While
Mark has used Simone to satisfy this same urge, and later, exploits Sylvia
merely to spark some jealousy within Joanna, she takes a lover to pass the time
until her husband comes to his senses. Within this milieu of the swinging
sixties, such laissez faire sexual attitudes and diversions were perhaps less
pronounced. Despite the equal opportunity in these infidelities there is no
salaciousness to the exercise itself, and, in the end, the marriage bond is
strengthened rather than ruptured.

Stanley Donen
would later comment that while most movies about love end in marriage, or with
the understanding ‘they lived happily
ever after’, Two For the Road is
a valiant attempt to illustrate merely that ‘they lived ever after’ – though only occasionally in harmony, often
with discord or under a cloud of self-inflicted disillusionment and/or
disappointments. The interwoven texture of Mark and Joanna’s tapestry of life is
fraught with such frayed threads. But these are never enough to split the
couple apart, perhaps because each is stubbornly resolved to make something
beautiful from the mess of their lives. Stanley Donen trundles out his series
of ingeniously concocted vignettes, made all the more extraordinary by his
unconventional editing; creating the very antithesis of the traditional ‘road picture’ as established in films
like Frank Capra’s immortal classic, It
Happened One Night (1932). It is Donen’s intuitiveness and aestheticism in
the editing process that makes the picture click as it should; his
juxtaposition of semi-humorous, somewhat tragic and impossibly poignant moments
to cumulatively capture the luminosity of this martyred love affair. It all
works spectacularly well and such a shame the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences did not acknowledge Two For
the Road as the obvious masterpiece it is; sinful too, audiences failed to
make it the smash sleeper hit of the season. In years yet to follow, Donen
would recall how he was repeatedly approached by marrieds and new couples alike
who found the film’s verisimilitude of this modern marriage in crisis a
poignant reminder of their own struggles in love and life; high praise indeed
for which Donen has remained extremely grateful.

In fact, he
regards Two For the Road as the very
best of his non-musical movies…and so do we. What Donen had originally
perceived as a relatively inexpensive and presumably ‘easy to shoot’ road picture evolved into an entirely different
animal; the menagerie of weighty camera equipment, dollies, cast and crew being
trucked around France leading to an ordeal of sorts, one rescued in the editing
process; the pieces coming together with brilliant clarity and precision. One
curiosity about Two For the Roadpersists: in two biographies written about Audrey Hepburn there are passages
attesting to the actress’ apprehensions to film a ‘skinny dip’ sequence. Although Hepburn does appear – presumably
nude – in a bathtub (shot only from the neck up and surrounded by bubbles),
with only her exposed back to the camera, and Donen has attested in interviews
to Audrey’s intense fear of deep water, reluctantly committing to a sequence in
which Mark tosses her fully clothed body into a swimming pool, there is no ‘skinny dipping’ scene in Two For The Road! None was ever even
scripted by Frederic Raphael. Today, Two
For the Road’s clear-eyed take on ‘modern marriage’ seems even more vatic.
The purity of the work itself and the performances given have made it as relevant
today; perhaps perennially so.

It has taken
far too long to get Two For the Road released in North America. Twilight Time’s
new to Blu appears to mirror the quality of Eureka! Masters of Cinema release
from several years ago – which is a blessing. We gain a new audio commentary
from Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman, also TT’s usual commitment to providing an ‘isolated
score’ (and actually, the first time the actual film score has been available
anywhere – previous album versions were re-orchestrations done by Mancini). They
have also managed to port over Stanley Donen’s originally produced audio
commentary for the now defunct Fox Studio Classics DVD. Regrettably, we lose
the featurette, Frederic Raphael - Memories of Travelers – 25 introspective
minutes with the screenwriter; also, the 36 page booklet with introspective
critique by Jessica Felrice, replaced herein by Julie Kirgo’s usually adroit,
though too brief 4 page liner notes. I like Kirgo’s writing style, but on this
outing I prefer Felrice’s more thorough reflections. When extras like this
are cut from intercontinental reissues it is usually due to a ‘rights issue’. Pity that. To my eyes,
the new TT is identical to the MoC Blu-ray, everything looking gorgeous; colors
eye-popping brilliant and fine detail in hair, skin, clothing and those
gorgeously lit location backdrops revealing a startling amount of razor-sharp/picture
perfect clarity. The DTS audio is predictably robust. Remembering that
virtually all the audio had to be post-sync back at Fox - Jacqueline Bisset
actually dubbed by another actress after Donen could not get Bisset back in
time to do her own vocals - the Blu-ray seems to handle the limitations of then
complicated post sync rather well. Bottom line: Two For the Road via Twilight Time comes very highly recommended. Your
old Fox DVD is officially a coaster for your drink while enjoying this classy
classic remastered in high def.

About Me

Nick Zegarac is a freelance writer/editor and graphics artist. He holds a Masters in Communications and an Honors B.A in Creative Lit from the University of Windsor.
He is currently a freelance writer and has been a contributing editor for Black Moss Press and is a featured contributor to online's The Subtle Tea. He's also has had two screenplays under consideration in Hollywood.
Last year he finished his first novel and is currently searching for an agent to represent him.
Contact Nick via email at movieman@sympatico.ca